A large majority of the American population believes that the content in some video games causes violent behavior in the people who play them. Take the highly controversial Grand Theft Auto franchise for example. Grand Theft Auto V had record breaking sales in its first day of being released. It is a game revolving around, chaos. It breaks the boundaries of the phrase “do whatever you want,” because in this game, you can buy a million dollar car one minute, and then the next, it explodes because you drove it straight into a taco truck. Or, the player could purchase a tank and go on a rampage through the streets. Now these are the kind of actions that cause many people to think that video games cause violent behavior, but this is simply not the case. Recent studies show that violent video games have nothing to do with the actions of people in real life. It is only mental defects that cause such actions.

I strongly agree with these studies. The fact that so many people blame video games for tragedies such as the Sandy Hook shooting is just absurd. These happenings are the result of mental illness, not because someone wanted to recreate a video game in real life. As I said earlier, Grand Theft Auto V had record-breaking sales in its first day. Basically, this means that millions upon millions of people bought the game, many not as mature as they ought to be. You don’t see these millions of people going out and carjacking someone do you? Didn’t think so. The only reason that these things might happen is that a few very impressionable kids that are WAY too young to be playing violent games, go and try and do what they saw in real life. But still, this isn’t the video games’ faults. It’s the result of parents that don’t care what their kids play or see on TV.

So now the problem stands, what can we do to make people see that video games are not at fault for violence? There are too  many people that need something to blame for violence in America, and unfortunately, their scapegoat is video games. Despite the large amounts of scientific research that disproves that video games cause violence in people, not enough of them will listen.

~Ethan